Metahab

Individuals experience crisis when the estimation of resources needed to successfully manage trauma, crisis or a catastrophic situation are greater than resources perceived available. Current biomedical models of rehabilitation and recovery are insufficient. They fail to focus on and incorporate the individual’s capacity for survival as well as utilization of prior successful experiences with trauma in the therapeutic planning for their recovery and rehabilitation. Meta-Habilitation©, a recovery philosophy and system, recognizes the individual’s capacity and promotes each person’s biological, psychological and spiritual ability to survive but, more importantly, to be transformed and experience a higher level of functioning brought about by life crisis, trauma, even catastrophe. These events become opportunities to creatively restructure the self and find meaning, even in suffering, lifting anguish, fear and frustration and ultimately transforming personal tragedy into triumph (Viktor Frankl). Extensive research, literary review and interviews with survivors revealed insights into this concept. Troubling and unacceptable limitations in current rehabilitative and recovery models provided the rationale and motivation for a new treatment modality; a system guiding one toward full and complete recovery or metahabilitation©. Stages, characteristics and facilitating conditions of metahabilitated survivors were discovered ushering in a new system of recovery.